Teaching
Michael is available for craft talks, readings, workshops, and lectures at universities, MFA programs, literary festivals, and religious-arts organizations.
Formats
I.
Craft talks & readings
Single-event visits. A short reading from new or published work, a craft talk built around a specific problem in fiction, and Q&A. Talks have covered place-based fiction, POV considerations, understanding literary publishing, and what an ending owes the rest of the story.
II.
Writing workshops
Small-group workshops built around participants' pages. Structured around a single craft question per session — the sentence, the scene, compelling openings, turns in poetry — rather than a round-table critique of full drafts. Limited to twelve participants; readings circulated in advance.
III.
Lectures on faith & the arts
Material that explores the Christian imagination, which is the territory of Michael's current DMin work at Western. Lectures consider how the religious imagination operates inside contemporary fiction, how the history of iconoclasm affects engagement with the visual arts, a theology for crafting prose and poetry, literary readings of the Bible.